Why Do You Trust The Web?

A British study suggests that web users looking for medical information avoid many high-quality sites in favor of those with a more personal look and feel. But doing that could prove harmful to your health. Drug companies often have the most accurate information about their products and stodgy government sites are typically worth their weight in gold.

Readers of this blog may get the impression that I ignore research studies funded by pharmaceutical companies, for example, because of the potential for funding bias. Not so. I'm just careful about how I use that information. Pharmaceutical companies often have the best information about potential side effects--they are required to by law, after all.

So if you needed to look up information about the common allergy medication Zyrtec, for example, zero in on the "prescribing information" section on the zyrtec.com site, maintained by Pfizer. It will tell you what the company has told the Food and Drug Administration. Then check out the history of the drug at the FDA's own database. That will tell you about an FDA warning that pharmacists have been known to confuse Zyrtec and Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic medication, when filling prescriptions. Then you can expand your search to other sites that offer more personal experiences.

One such site that I'm now exploring provides the personal point of view for various medical procedures. It's called Dipex.org and was started by a couple of physicians who realized when they themselves became sick (one had cancer; the other needed a knee operation) that despite having a lot of medical information at their fingertips they didn't have the real-world experience that would help them make better decisions about their own health care. The site has plenty of videos and print stories to get you started. Well worth a look.

Overall, I'd say whenever you're searching for health information on the web, you need to balance authenticity and authority. Some of those authentic-looking personal sites have no authority--meaning their information is unreliable--while some of those authoritative web sites are sadly lacking in real-world experience.

Source: Briggs et al, How do patients evaluate and make use of online health information? Social Science and Medicine, available online 27 February 2007.